Edge Computing for the Internet of Things

Abstract

By moving data computation and service supply from the cloud to the edge, edge computing has become a promising solution to address the limitations of cloud computing in supporting delay-sensitive and context-aware services in the Internet of Things (IoT) era. Instead of performing data storage and computing in a cluster of clouds, edge computing emphasizes leveraging the power of local computing and using different types of nearby devices/architectures as edge servers to provide timely and intelligent services. In this way, it can bring many advantages, including highly improved scalability by timely and intelligent service supply and local distributed computing that makes full use of client computing capabilities to meet the requirements of contextual computing. However, to truly realize edge computing in IoT applications, there are still many challenges that need to be addressed, such as how to efficiently distribute and manage data storage and computing, how to make edge computing collaborate with cloud computing for more scalable services, as well as how to secure and preserve the privacy of the whole system. The purpose of this Special Issue is to investigate the current research trends, and to help stakeholders in industry and academia to better understand challenges, recent advances, and potential research directions in the developing field of edge computing. Through an open call for papers and rigorous peer review, we selected 20 articles from 63 submissions as representatives of ongoing research and development activities. These 20 articles not only encompass a wide range of research topics in edge computing, but also bring some prominent research outcomes in transparent computing. We briefly divide the accepted articles into categories and discuss them briefly.